"A similar problem afflicts any corporate cost-cutting exercise that focuses on maximising employees’ efficiency: the more of their hours that are put to productive use, the less available they will be to respond, on the spur of the moment, to critical new demands. For that kind of responsiveness, idle time must be built into the system."

"“The best companies I visited, all through the years, were never very hurried,” DeMarco said. “Maybe they used pressure from time to time, as a sort of amusing side-effect. But it was never a constant. Because you don’t get creativity for free. You need people to be able to sit back, put their feet up, and think.” Manual work can be speeded up, at least to a certain extent, by increasing the time pressure on workers. But good ideas do not emerge more rapidly when people feel under the gun – if anything, the good ideas dry up."

"Besides, on closer inspection, even the lesser promises of time management were not all they appeared to be. An awkward truth about Taylor’s celebrated efficiency drives is that they were not very successful: Bethlehem Steel fired him in 1901, having paid him vast sums without any clearly detectable impact on its own profits. (One persistent consequence of his schemes was that they seemed promising at first, but left workers too exhausted to function consistently over the long term.)"

"Two years after his Google talk, Mann released a rambling and slightly manic online video in which he announced that he had signed a contract for an Inbox Zero book. But his career as a productivity guru had begun to stir an inner conflict. “I started making pretty good money from it” – from speaking and consulting – “but I also started to feel terrible,” he told me earlier this year. “This topic of productivity induces the worst kind of procrastination, because it feels like you’re doing work, but I was producing stuff that had the express purpose of saying to people, ‘Look, come and see how to do your work, rather than doing your work!’”"

"Preliminary mid-2017 numbers from government data are even better. They count nearly 70,000 brewery employees, nearly three times the figure just 10 years ago. Average beer prices have grown nearly 50 percent. So while Americans are drinking less beer than they did in the 2000s (probably a good thing) they’re often paying more for a superior product (another good thing). Meanwhile, the best-selling beers in the country are all in steep decline, as are their producers. Between 2007 and 2016, shipments from five major brewers—Anheuser-Busch, MillerCoors, Heineken, Pabst, and Diageo, which owns Guinness—fell by 14 percent. Goliaths are tumbling, Davids are ascendant, and beer is one of the unambiguously happy stories in the U.S. economy. The same effect is happening at liquor distilleries and wineries. Employment within both groups grew by 70 percent between 2006 and 2016, thanks, in part, to the falling real costs of booze-producing equipment and the ease of advertising local businesses on social media."

"PG Steven’s new book tells us we’re living longer, with greater wealth, peace and equality, and less racism and sexism. It’s so counterintuitive to the feeling in the air. What’s the value in correcting that? Will it change behavior?

BG Absolutely. The present techniques we use as a society — law, democracy, some degree of progressive taxation — as imperfect as they are, are working by lots of key measures. So, when you consider a radical change, like “Hey, let’s tear up the global trade agreements; they’re a disaster,” you’re more likely to implement it if you think things are getting worse. “Let’s tear up the treaties. Let’s try a nondemocratic approach.” Your willingness to go off the current path is much, much higher. But you can hardly be serious about government — or society as a whole — unless you say: What are the measures that count, and how are we doing on those measures?"

Phone
Messages
Camera
Apps that make me feel like I live in the future, kept in a folder inventively called “The Future.” Dropbox, Google Maps, Uber, Rdio, Instacart, and so on. There are a lot of non-distractors that are amazing. (Even the weather app is pretty cool, when I stop and think about it. I mean, in the 1980s, I had a Walkman. That’s my point of reference: a freakin’ Walkman. It’s totally amazing that you can get a weather report in your pocket. And I would never, ever get addicted to it.)
Useful things I rarely use, like a New York subway map or the compass."

"Consider the remarkable finding, by the economist Amartya Sen, that in the history of the world, there has never been a famine in a system with a democratic press and free elections. A central reason is that famines are a product not only of a scarcity of food, but also a nation’s failure to provide solutions. When the press is free, and when leaders are elected, leaders have a strong incentive to help."

"I once worried that if I followed Lindbeck’s thought too far, I would become intolerant. After abandoning the liberal desire to subsume Christ into a universal religiosity that transcends him, is the only other option a narrow faith that says that Christian beliefs aren’t just different, they’re superior?

The conundrum is real. Lindbeck taught me to oppose those who insist different religions are simply “different paths up the same mountain.” Because it ignores the specifics that make religions vital in the first place, their approach carries mudslides and avalanches, imperiling every path it wants to swallow. I worry that the mainline church’s drastic decline is spurred by our willingness to set aside what makes us unique in the first place.

But the insistence on Christian particularity seems to require its adherents to buttonhole strangers on airplanes and insult their Jewish friends. In 2002 I sent George Lindbeck an email sharing this anxiety. He wrote me back immediately, suggesting a humility that doesn’t always come with brilliance.

He said, "Much of what other religions teach, for instance, the importance of compassion in Buddhism, may well be truth God gives to them, and through them to us. Christians don't have all of God's truth. What we have is the criterion of all truth, Jesus Christ.""

"In 2010, David Carr observed, in a piece about the Awl for the Times, that the idea of a “little digital boutique flies in the face of all manner of conventional wisdom, chief of which is that scale is all that matters in an era of commoditized advertising sales.” Nonetheless, the Awl’s focus on voice and sensibility seemed, at the time, to be working, even financially. That year’s revenue would surpass two hundred thousand dollars, Carr reported, and the site would never have to turn giant profits for investors, because it had none. The owners “just have to eat,” he wrote."

"Normal human beings make a solid point: We can and should investigate education’s broad social implications. When humanists consider my calculations of education’s returns, they assume I’m being a typical cynical economist, oblivious to the ideals so many educators hold dear. I am an economist and I am a cynic, but I’m not a typical cynical economist. I’m a cynical idealist. I embrace the ideal of transformative education. I believe wholeheartedly in the life of the mind. What I’m cynical about is people.

I’m cynical about students. The vast majority are philistines. I’m cynical about teachers. The vast majority are uninspiring. I’m cynical about “deciders”—the school officials who control what students study. The vast majority think they’ve done their job as long as students comply.

Those who search their memory will find noble exceptions to these sad rules. I have known plenty of eager students and passionate educators, and a few wise deciders. Still, my 40 years in the education industry leave no doubt that they are hopelessly outnumbered. Meritorious education survives but does not thrive."

"Of course, college students aren’t supposed to just download facts; they’re supposed to learn how to think in real life. How do they fare on this count? The most focused study of education’s effect on applied reasoning, conducted by Harvard’s David Perkins in the mid-1980s, assessed students’ oral responses to questions designed to measure informal reasoning, such as “Would a proposed law in Massachusetts requiring a five-cent deposit on bottles and cans significantly reduce litter?” The benefit of college seemed to be zero: Fourth-year students did no better than first-year students."

"Professionally, too, I have seen just how profoundly men don’t want to talk about their own gendered nature. In the spring, I published a male take on the fluctuations of gender and power in advanced economies; I was interviewed over 70 times by reporters from all over the world, but only three of them were men. Men just aren’t interested; they don’t know where to start. I’m working on a podcast on modern fatherhood, dealing with issues like pornography and sex after childbirth. Very often, when I interview men, it is the first time they have ever discussed intimate questions seriously with another man.

A healthy sexual existence requires a continuing education, and men have the opposite. There is sex education for boys, but once you leave school the traditional demands on masculinity return: show no vulnerability, solve your own problems. Men deal with their nature alone, and apart. Ignorance and misprision are the norms."

"Shockely suggest that producing a paper is tantamount to clearing every one of a sequence of hurdles. He specifically lists:

ability to think of a good problem
ability to work on it
ability to recognize a worthwhile result
ability to make a decision as to when to stop
and write up the results
ability to write adequately
ability to profit constructively from criticism
determination to submit the paper to a journal
persistence in making changes (if necessary as a result of
journal action).
Shockley then posits, what if the odds of a person clearing hurdle #i from the list of 8 above is pi? Then the rate of publishing papers for this individual should be proportional to p1p2p3…p8. This gives the multiplication of random variables needed to explain the lognormal distribution of productivity (Shockley goes on to note that if one person is 50% above average in each of the 8 areas then they will be 2460% more productive than average at the total process).

But what I really like and take home from this paper is the hurdle model and how I find it a useful way to think about my paper writing productivity. The model says writing a paper is not about one thing. It is about a bunch of things. And – the really surprising point – all of those things count more or less equally."

"BS is the failure of leaders in higher education to champion the liberal-arts ideal — that college should challenge, develop, and transform students’ minds and hearts so they can lead good, flourishing, and socially productive lives — and their stampeding into the "practical" enterprise of producing specialized workers to feed The Economy."

"So much in our workplaces is premised on the conventional wisdom that hard work is the road to success, and that working the hardest makes you a star. Our analysis suggests the opposite. Yes, the best performers work hard (about 50 hours a week in our data, like Natalie), but they don’t outperform because they work longer hours. They outperform because they have the courage to cut back and simplify when others pile on, to say “no” when others say “yes,” to pursue value when others just meet internal goals, and to change how they do their jobs when others stick with the status quo. They’re innovators of work."

"It’s great to see the New York Times finally give Washington its due. Robert Draper’s account of 36 hours in this lively, diverse, quirky, multicultural world capital is worth a scan — even for New Yorkers. It baffles me why so few in the bigger metropolis ever visit, when it’s just three hours away by train. I suspect that the clichés about it are actually believed. Most of America thinks of the city as synonymous with evil; the rest believes it’s crushingly dull. It is neither. My own chauvinism is in the public record, of course. I tried living in New York City for a year and a half and found it intolerable: sunless, overcrowded, rude, incompetent, ugly, massively overpriced, deeply parochial and insular, and an endless assault course of hassle and attitude. There’s also a wider variety of views in D.C., in part because the city has to sustain a lot of Republicans as well as Democrats. So it doesn’t have quite the stifling left-liberal bubble of Manhattan, or the oppressive feel of the People’s Republic of Woke across the river in Brooklyn. No offense, of course!"

"In 2011, I decided to try to answer the question of why some people outperform others. I recruited a team of researchers with expertise in statistical analysis and began generating a set of hypotheses about which specific behaviors lead to high performance. We then conducted a five-year survey of 5,000 managers and employees, including sales reps, lawyers, actuaries, brokers, medical doctors, software programmers, engineers, store managers, plant foremen, nurses and even a Las Vegas casino dealer.

The common practice we found among the highest-ranked performers in our study wasn’t at all what we expected. It wasn’t a better ability to organize or delegate. Instead, top performers mastered selectivity. Whenever they could, they carefully selected which priorities, tasks, meetings, customers, ideas or steps to undertake and which to let go. They then applied intense, targeted effort on those few priorities in order to excel. We found that just a few key work practices related to such selectivity accounted for two-thirds of the variation in performance among our subjects. Talent, effort and luck undoubtedly mattered as well, but not nearly as much."

"We also see many governments failing to prepare for the future, on issues ranging from retirement and infrastructure to automation and worker retraining. As a result, society increasingly is turning to the private sector and asking that companies respond to broader societal challenges. Indeed, the public expectations of your company have never been greater. Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose. To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society. Companies must benefit all of their stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, customers, and the communities in which they operate.

Without a sense of purpose, no company, either public or private, can achieve its full potential. It will ultimately lose the license to operate from key stakeholders. It will succumb to short-term pressures to distribute earnings, and, in the process, sacrifice investments in employee development, innovation, and capital expenditures that are necessary for long-term growth. It will remain exposed to activist campaigns that articulate a clearer goal, even if that goal serves only the shortest and narrowest of objectives. And ultimately, that company will provide subpar returns to the investors who depend on it to finance their retirement, home purchases, or higher education."

"But Deneen comes as a Jeremiah to announce that Tocqueville’s fear that liberalism would eventually dissolve all these inheritances, leaving only a selfish individualism and soft bureaucratic despotism locked in a strange embrace, may now fully be upon us. Where it once delivered equality, liberalism now offers plutocracy; instead of liberty, appetitiveness regulated by a surveillance state; instead of true intellectual and religious freedom, growing conformity and mediocrity. It has reduced rich cultures to consumer products, smashed social and familial relations, and left us all the isolated and mutually suspicious inhabitants of an “anticulture” from which many genuine human goods have fled."

"14. AUGUST 21, 2017: TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE (Sleeping at Last) - I knew I wanted to end the favorites with this song the moment I heard it. Here’s the setting… Ryan (aka Sleeping at Last) asked myself and two friends (Justin/Brian) to do a little road trip on August 21st for the Total Eclipse. We hopped in his Tesla and basically chased good weather until we somewhat randomly ended up in Hopkinsville, KY, which apparently was an epicenter for eclipse viewing (i.e. NASA was there with us). We camped out for a few hours until moments before the eclipse began, when the world seemed to be on a gigantic dimmer switch.

Well, Ryan had written/produced this song prior to the eclipse in order for it to be a soundtrack of sorts. In fact, it’s exactly 2:40 long, which is the exactly length of totality (at least where we were), and it is a mesh-of-sorts to his "Sun" and "Moon" song. Brilliant by the way.

So, I decided to pull out my headphones, cue up the song, and experience totality along with the music. Words cannot describe the experience. It was incredibly eerie, emotional, and spiritual… and hands down one of the most transcendent experiences I’ve ever had. And this song was ABSOLUTELY PERFECT. I invite you to listen with eyes closed... or with "eyes open" (whether they are actually or not)."

"11. iii (i.e. kokoro) - I was fortunate enough again to be asked to help produce Kelly Reed’s (i.e. kokoro) latest album, DECALOGUE, which will be released in a couple of months. In short, the album is 10 songs, written in 10 days, about 10 laws. More specifically, it's an exploration of the 10 Commandments through America's past, present and future. No doubt, this is some of Kelly’s best work – both lyrically and compositionally. While it’s full release isn’t until 2018, it’s 99% complete and I wanted to include one of my favorites on the album (and one of my favorites to mix). This is “iii”, which is an exposition on “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God name in vain.” I invite you to stay connected in order to track the release."

"The affirmative-consent and preponderance-of-the-evidence regimes shift the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused, eliminating the presumption of innocence. If the presumption of innocence is rooted in the idea that it is better to let ten guilty people go free than risk jailing one innocent person, then the policing of sex seems to assume that it’s better to have ten times less sex than to risk having a nonconsensual sexual experience. The problem is not just that this reduces the amount of sex people are likely to be having; it also serves to blur the boundaries between rape, nonviolent sexual coercion, and bad, fumbling, drunken sex. The effect is both to criminalize bad sex and trivialize rape."

"No one is or should be defending abuse of power. It’s foul. I’m glad certain monsters have been toppled. (For the record, I routinely believe the women in specific cases. I believed Anita Hill, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Juanita Broaddrick and did so on the record.) But nuance, context, and specifics matter. The Deneuve letter rightly insisted: “Rape is a crime. But insistent or clumsy flirting is not a crime, nor is gallantry a chauvinist aggression.” The manifesto observed the censorious Victorianism about some of the rhetoric, and the public invasion of private matters. But the French signatories also worried about due process: “This expedited justice already has its victims, men prevented from practicing their profession as punishment, forced to resign, etc., while the only thing they did wrong was touching a knee, trying to steal a kiss, or speaking about ‘intimate’ things at a work dinner, or sending messages with sexual connotations to a woman whose feelings were not mutual.” South Park, as usual, was ahead of the curve. Its season finale last month portrayed an office romance between PC Principal and a new character, Strong Woman. And at the mere suggestion of an affair between them, everyone instantly projectile vomits in disgust. What other response could there be to the idea of a relationship between co-workers?"

"The subway’s importance to the city begins with a single, durable economic principle: Cities create density, and density creates growth. Economists call the phenomenon agglomeration. Not only does geographical proximity reduce costs, but it also facilitates the exchange of knowledge and spurs innovation. It’s a principle that holds true for better and worse and regardless of the industry. The free-market economist Edward Glaeser has pointed out that the junk bonds and leveraged buyouts of ’70s and ’80s Wall Street were as much the product of human collaboration as they were of corporate greed. The urban-planning professor Elizabeth Currid-Halkett coined the phrase “the Warhol economy” to describe how this same sort of cross-fertilization and idea-sharing works in New York’s art, fashion and music worlds. As industries grow, they attract and create new, connected ones: Book publishers beget book agents, tech start-ups beget venture-capital firms and so on. It all begins with the ability to pack large numbers of people into small spaces and then unpack them at the end of the day. Without the subway, this process breaks down, and the city dissipates."

"For all the changes in transportation technology since the first tunnels were dug — the rise of the automobile, the proliferation of bike lanes and ferries, our growing addiction to ride-hailing apps and dreams of a future filled with autonomous vehicles — the subway remains the only way to move large numbers of people around the city. Today, New York’s subway carries close to six million people every day, more than twice the entire population of Chicago. The subway may no longer be a technological marvel, but it continues to perform a daily magic trick: It brings people together, but it also spreads people out. It is this paradox — these constant expansions and contractions, like a beating heart — that keep the human capital flowing and the city growing. New York’s subway has no zones and no hours of operation. It connects rich and poor neighborhoods alike. The subway has never been segregated. It is always open, and the fare is always the same no matter how far you need to go. In New York, movement — anywhere, anytime — is a right."

"Stay Tuned with Preet Bharara was one of my favorite new podcasts of the year. The two best episodes will do more to help you understand Putin and Russia than anything else you can do in a couple of hours. The Death of Sergei Magnitsky (with Bill Browder). And Putin, Pawns and Propaganda (with Garry Kasparov)"

"British soul singer Michael Kiwanuka put his name on the music map with the opening credits song from Big Little Lies. His whole album is fantastic and he’s even better live. Start with these two songs: One More Night and Love and Hate."

"If you want to get a better handle on the anger, despair, and frustration (with corporations and government) that is increasingly common in parts of America, watch this documentary on coal mine workers in West Virginia. Blood on the Mountain."

"Stephen King says, “The Force is mesmerizing, a triumph. Think The Godfather, only with cops. It’s that good.” And that’s a lukewarm review compared to what others said about Don Winslow’s latest novel. And if you haven’t read Winslow’s first two books (he’s working on the final part of the trilogy) on cartels, DEA agents and the drug war, get started now. It’s a tour de force."

"Real Sports has long been one of television’s best shows. They do news features as well as anyone. Here a recent piece Soledad O’brien did on two brothers who compete in triathlons together. Aldrich Brothers-Race Against Time."

"If you’re working all the time — that is, if you don’t get to leave the office until midnight and got there at 5am — you’re doing something wrong.

You’re either working for an idiot who is going to burn you out, or you’re the idiot and you haven’t figured out the short cuts. For a while I had 3 full time jobs (ones you’d have killed for) at the same time. I wasn’t working all hours of the same, I just did them simultaneously.

"The massive global platforms are defining a new political economy. Their corporate sovereignty will chafe with states own sovereignty. Those same nations will curry favour with the platforms to win the putative economic benefits provided by them. The large platforms know that governments will be seeking to reign in their power, through regulation or legislation. These firms will accelerate their efforts to secure platform advantage and raise the baseline from which their settlement will be judged in the years to come."

"At that point, to avoid coasting and becoming distracted, they need to focus on that final goal to see value in their actions,” Huang says. The research, co-written with Liyin Jin at Fudan University and Ying Zhang at Peking University, will appear in the July 2017 issue of the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.

For example, someone who has so far lost 32 pounds by aiming to shed two pounds a week probably feels assured he can reach a final goal of losing 40. To stay motivated, he should now shift his focus to the big 40-pound objective. Or, a student in her fourth year of school likely isn’t worried about passing her classes. To remind herself that studying is still worth the effort, she should now think about obtaining her degree instead of just passing yet another test."

"Finally, aim for full detachment. When we take a break, we often try to combine it with another cognitively demanding activity—checking our emails or talking to a colleague about a project deadline. That’s a mistake. Fully detached breaks have been found to ease stress and boost mood in a way that multitasking breaks do not. Another study from South Korea found that tech-free breaks increased vigor and reduced emotional exhaustion at work."

"What’s the smartest approach to taking breaks? Frequent short breaks are more effective than occasional ones. The ideal break also involves movement. A 2016 study published in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity showed that hourly five-minute walking breaks boosted energy levels, sharpened focus and “improved mood throughout the day and reduced feelings of fatigue in the late afternoon.” These “microbursts of activity,” as the researchers called them, were also more valuable than a single 30-minute walking break. And regular short walking breaks increase motivation and concentration and enhance creativity, according to researchers at Stanford University."

"The key is to seek what psychologists call the “synchrony effect”—to bring your own daily rhythms, your task (is it analytical, administrative or insight?) and your time (is it early, midday or later?) into alignment. Doing your analytic work during the rebound or your creative work during the trough is an ideal way to sabotage your resolutions."

"The trough is an especially dangerous time for health-care professionals and their patients. In a study published in 2006 in Quality and Safety in Health Care, researchers at Duke Medical Center reviewed about 90,000 surgeries at the hospital and found that harmful anesthesia errors were three times more likely in procedures that began at 3 p.m. than at 8 a.m."

"During the peak, our ability to focus is at its best. When we wake up, our body temperature slowly rises. That rising temperature gradually boosts our energy level and alertness—and that, in turn, enhances our executive functioning, our ability to concentrate and our powers of deduction. For most of us, these sharp-minded analytic capacities crest in the late morning or around noon. This is when we are most vigilant, when we can keep distractions from penetrating our cerebral gates. That makes the peak the best time to tackle work that requires heads-down attention and analysis, such as writing a legal brief or auditing financial statements.

Vigilance, though, has its limits. Alertness and energy levels tend to plummet during the afternoons. And with that drop comes a corresponding fall in our ability to remain focused and constrain our inhibitions. This is the second stage: The trough, which usually occurs in the early to midafternoon."

"Second, these daily fluctuations can be extreme. “The performance change between the daily high point and the daily low point can be equivalent to the effect on performance of drinking the legal limit of alcohol,” write Russell Foster, a neuroscientist and chronobiologist at the University of Oxford, and Leon Kreitzman in their book “Rhythms of Life.” Other research has shown that time-of-day effects can explain 20% of the variance in human performance on cognitive undertakings."

"Warren challenges the cultural trend of young people taking “time off” from school or work in order to “get away from it all” and find themselves. He writes:

In the phrase [“to find myself”] lurks the idea that the self is a pre-existing entity, a self like a Platonic idea existing in a mystic realm beyond time and change. No, rather an object like a nugget of gold in the placer pan, the Easter egg under the bush at an Easter-egg hunt, a four-leaf clover to promise miraculous luck. Here is the essence of passivity, one’s quintessential luck. And the essence of absurdity, too, for the self is never to be found, but must be created, not the happy accident of passivity, but the product of a thousand actions, large and small, conscious or unconscious, performed not “away from it all,” but in the face of “it all,” for better or for worse, in work and leisure rather than in free time.

In consonance with my own deep belief in the ongoingness and fluidity of our becoming, Warren adds:

The self is a style of being, continually expanding in a vital process of definition, affirmation, revision, and growth, a process that is the image, we may say, of the life process of a healthy society itself."

"Fjord’s report reveals that the rise of The Ethics Economy coincides with a decline in government and other institutional trust, a sad reality. But there is a silver lining for organizations—if they’re able to highlight their actions and position themselves as important new societal and political influencers.

We’ve already seen such moves from leading businesses: Tesla deploying massive batteries with solar panels to help power hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico…Ikea hiring refugees in the Middle East as part of a 200,000-jobs social entrepreneurship program...and British department store John Lewis ceasing to sell clothing with “boys” and “girls” labels, based on its stated corporate support for gender equality and diversity.

Taking an ethical stand and making an ethical difference are becoming key business differentiators—especially when employees grow their knowledge on these issues. At Accenture, we recently redesigned our code of business ethics to make it more accessible, replacing a standard legal document with an interactive chatbot that can field questions and provide info on a broader range of relevant topics, like data privacy and human rights."

"To break out of a bad-habit loop, we need to change the routine that follows the cue, then reward ourselves for the routine. So instead of looking at Instagram for a half-hour when I hear my alarm (cue), I can hop out of bed (routine), which will make me feel superaccomplished (reward) for being on time."

"The trick, Tim writes, is to begin with forgiving ourselves for screwing up. From there, we can break the things we have to do down into tiny, easily tackled mini-tasks; seek external support for our goals; minimize distractions; and aim for steady, incremental accomplishments instead of huge, goliath-size ones. (“Write the intro to your presentation” as opposed to “Write your presentation.”)"

"This is a concept my colleague Charles Duhigg has explored at length, and I’ll let him take it from here: “At the core of every habit,” he writes, “is a neurological loop with three parts: A cue, a routine and a reward. To understand how to create habits — such as exercise habits — you must learn to establish the right cues and rewards.”"

"I’ve published my notes to that effect in a hundred-page working paper, and I won’t try to sum up the entire effort here. Strategy is hard work, and there are no magic shortcuts. What I offer here is a starting point: the most basic questions that every successful business must answer. Entrepreneurs who design their business around these questions will have a leg up when it comes to crafting strategy.

To begin, you can sketch out your answers to these questions on a single index card."

"Already we have seen companies make computational capabilities more accessible to non-specialists. Recent MIT spinoff pienso, for instance, seeks to make “AI for All.” To empower people with no data science background to create and train their own machine learning models. In this vision, domain expertise becomes more important than programming savvy.

Ultimately, coding isn't the point. The objective is to communicate what we want computational systems to do.
The need for humans to code will gradually disappear for all but the most specialized situations. Platforms will enable humans to describe in natural spoken or written language what they’d like computers to accomplish. The coding will occur behind the computational scenes. We won’t code so much as direct and request. Ultimately, coding isn’t the point. The objective is to define and communicate what we want computational systems to do."

"It isn’t easy to find. In her new book “Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics,” R. Marie Griffith explains the divide between liberal and conservative Christians as a casualty of “the sex wars” — disagreements over women’s rights, birth control, abortion and L.G.B.T. issues. By the time the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, she writes, “the rupture between Christian antagonists in the sex wars felt irremediable: one could plausibly argue that Christianity had flat out split into two virtually nonoverlapping religions.”

What Christians need is a new right-to-life movement, one in which we agree to disagree about contentious issues of sexuality and focus instead on what we share, on what we all believe. Jesus had nothing to say about birth control or abortion or homosexuality. He did have quite a lot to say about the poor and the vulnerable, and maybe that’s a good place to start."

Wunderlist, our favorite app for shared lists, also released a version of its app with Apple Watch support. You can view your inbox, your items due today, and important to-dos that are assigned to you. You can also use the Digital Crown to quickly scroll through all your lists."

We chose Pinner as our favorite Pinboard app a few months back. With Pinner for Apple Watch, you can check out the popular and recent bookmarks from Pinboard, and you can also search for bookmark tags using dictation and see bookmarks from your network."

"Although Star Wars is a bit of a cartoon, it also has feeling and depth, and real insight into human psychology. Drawing on Joseph Campbell’s idea of “The Hero With a Thousand Faces,” Lucas told a universal tale (actually, two tales) about heroic journeys and freedom of choice, exercised for better or for worse by two young men, Anakin Skywalker and his son Luke. Both of them are deeply tempted by evil. Lucas is candid and vivid about the seductive, even erotic power of the Dark Side of the Force.

Anakin is seduced; he becomes Darth Vader. Luke is barely able to resist -- and for a crucial moment, he too is seduced. Lucas’ story, reflecting the influence of Christianity (and the hope in every human heart), offers a lesson: All of us can be redeemed if we choose the Light when the chips are down.

When Lucas’s protagonists do go bad, it is for one reason: They cannot bear to lose someone they love. The path to the Dark Side is paved by grief and loss. But in a stunning reversal of what seems to be his main theme, Lucas also shows that fear of loss (otherwise known as love) is the path to redemption as well.

At its heart, Lucas’s tale is about fathers and sons, and about how much they need each other. Luke believes -- whatever the objective evidence -- that his father has good in him. (Doesn’t every son believe that?) Vader gives his life to save his son. (Wouldn’t every father do that?)"

"Critical thinking predicts a wide range of life events. In a series of studies, conducted in the U.S. and abroad, my colleagues and I have found that critical thinkers experience fewer bad things in life. We asked people to complete an inventory of life events and take a critical thinking assessment (the Halpern Critical Thinking Assessment). The critical thinking assessment measures five components of critical thinking skills including verbal reasoning, argument analysis, hypothesis testing, probability and uncertainty, decision-making, and problem-solving. The inventory of negative life events captures different domains of life such as academic (e.g., I forgot about an exam), health (e.g., I contracted a sexually transmitted infection because I did not wear a condom), legal (e.g., I was arrested for driving under the influence), interpersonal (e.g., I cheated on my romantic partner who I had been with for over a year), financial (e.g., I have over $5,000 of credit card debt), etc. Repeatedly, we found that critical thinkers experience fewer negative life events. This is an important finding because there is plenty of evidence that critical thinking can be taught and improved."

"We all need to promote our work. I’ve learned in my research that successful givers are ambitious for others and When you produce something you think is interesting or important, share it with people who might benefit from it. If that’s the only thing you share, it looks like self-promotion. But if you regularly distribute and recognize other people’s work too, there’s no backlash. You’re known as someone who has useful knowledge and is generous in sharing it."

"Time block daily plans. In BuJo, each day is driven by a daily log page that contains a list of tasks and events. As longtime readers know, I am not a fan of using lists to dictate your behavior. It’s much more effective to block out the hours of your day and assign them to specific efforts. This time blocking strategy provides a much more realistic assessment of how much time you really have free and allows you more control in optimizing your use of this time. This doesn’t mean, of course, that every waking minute must be scheduled. Effective time blockers tend to to block out all hours during the work day, and then fall back to a more informal plan for their hours outside work. (See here for more on time blocking.)"

"In the past I’ve referred to Myanmar’s atrocities against its Rohingya Muslim minority as “ethnic cleansing,” but increasingly there are indications that the carnage may amount to genocide. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, backed by a Myanmar-focused human rights organization called Fortify Rights, argues that there is “growing evidence of genocide,” and Yale scholars made a similar argument even before the latest spasms of violence."

"Research suggests that around age 7, humans develop an ability for what’s called counterfactual thinking, the capacity to imagine what might have been. In one study, Americans list romance as a top source of regret, followed by family, education, career and finance. Social regrets — wishing you’d married someone else, for instance — tend to be more intense than nonsocial ones. People identify regret as the second most common emotional state, after love. Don’t worry too much about missteps: Regrets of action (quitting a job, say) are generally stronger at first but fade more quickly than regrets of inaction (staying in a career you dislike), which persist and can become a sort of passive wistfulness.

Imagine regret as the psychological version of physical pain, drawing attention to something inside that’s off or in need of healing. “Regret is a signal that you’re learning from your mistakes,” Summerville says. If you wish you were more communicative about your emotions with an ex-lover, for example, let that feeling steer you to more openness in future relationships. Consider seeking help from a therapist if you experience what Summerville calls “ruminative regret,” the negative thoughts that arise repeatedly, unbidden, alongside anxiety and depression. “Poking at a wound in that way is not going to make it better,” she says."

"Alright but what about successful firms? That’s what the VCs care about.

In Silicon Valley, the ones with a successful exit have an average founding age of 47!

What are we missing then?

Probably lots of stuff. This is just the basic data results. It doesn’t seem to pass the standards of modern econometrics (yet). So it may be that we can work out what is at the bottom of this. But it sure is provocative at the moment and should give Silicon Valley investors types some food for thought. It should also cause us to have another look at whether encouraging 20 somethings with endless entrepreneurship programs is a good idea."

"I don’t think operating over many disciplines, as I do, is a good idea for most people. I think it’s fun, that’s why I’ve done it. And I’m better at it than most people would be, and I don’t think I’m good at being the very best at handling differential equations. So, it’s been a wonderful path for me, but I think the correct path for everybody else is to specialize and get very good at something that society rewards, and then to get very efficient at doing it. But even if you do that, I think you should spend 10 to 20% of your time [on] trying to know all the big ideas in all the other disciplines. Otherwise … you’re like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. It’s not going to work very well. You have to know the big ideas in all the disciplines to be safe if you have a life lived outside a cave. But no, I think you don’t want to neglect your business as a dentist to think great thoughts about Proust."

"Virtually all investors have been told when they were younger — or implicitly believe, or have been tacitly encouraged to do so by the cookie-cutter curriculums of the business schools they all attend — that the more they understand the world, the better their investment results. It makes sense, doesn’t it? The more information we acquire and evaluate, the “better informed” we become, the better our decisions. Accumulating information, becoming “better informed,” is certainly an advantage in numerous, if not most, fields.

But not in the eld of counterintuitive world of investing, where accumulating information can hurt your investment results."
One could argue that the more you know, the more you actually 320 in there in the past

"In this article, Nixon explores the question I asked above. In doing so, he outlines two main “channels” through which the new technologies of the Network Age might impact economic productivity indicators:

Channel #1: These technologies can distract employees from their actual work. If you spend less time working, and more time skimming your Facebook newsfeed, you get less done.
Channel #2: These technologies can directly and permanently reduce the rate at which employees produce value using their brains. If your workflow requires you to constantly check emails, then your ability to create new value is dampened.
My suspicion is that the second channel is the main culprit. As I’ve argued before (c.f., this article I wrote for HBR.org), the front office IT revolution, in which we hooked knowledge workers together with high-speed communication networks, has been a mixed blessing."

"This is why I was pleased when many of you forwarded me an article titled: “Is the economy suffering from the crisis of attention?” It’s written by Dan Nixon, a (serious) economist at the Bank of England."

"You might think you’ve seen this all before. You probably have, but never quite like this. What Ms. Gerwig has done — and it’s by no means a small accomplishment — is to infuse one of the most convention-bound, rose-colored genres in American cinema with freshness and surprise. The characters can look like familiar figures: the sad dad and the disapproving mom; the sullen brother and his goth girlfriend (Marielle Scott); the mean girls and the cool teachers; the too-perfect boyfriend (Lucas Hedges) and the dirtbag boyfriend (Timothée Chalamet). None of them are caricatures, though, and while everyone is mocked, nobody is treated with cruelty or contempt, at least by Ms. Gerwig. (Lady Bird is not always so kind.)"

"The idea that attention is a form of love (and vice versa) is a beautiful insight, and in many ways it’s the key to “Lady Bird,” Greta Gerwig’s beautiful, insightful new film, the first for which she is solely credited as writer and director."

"Portugal’s policy rests on three pillars: one, that there’s no such thing as a soft or hard drug, only healthy and unhealthy relationships with drugs; two, that an individual’s unhealthy relationship with drugs often conceals frayed relationships with loved ones, with the world around them, and with themselves; and three, that the eradication of all drugs is an impossible goal."

"Both these alternatives — walkable communities and co-housing — sound exotic to American ears. Thanks to shifting baselines, most Americans only know single-family dwellings and auto-dependent land use. They cannot even articulate what they are missing and often misidentify the solution as more or different private consumption.

But I do not think we should just accept that when we marry and start families, we atomize, and our friendships, like our taste in music, freeze where they were when we were young and single. We shouldn't just accept a way of living that makes interactions with neighbors and friends a burden that requires special planning.

We should recognize that by shrinking our network of strong social ties to our immediate families, we lose something important to our health and social identities, with the predictable result that we are ridden with anxiety and loneliness. We are meant to have tribes, to be among people who know us and care about us."

"When the time comes, Pence takes the stage and greets the crowd with a booming “Hellooooo, Indiana!” He says he has “just hung up the phone” with Donald Trump and that the president asked him to “say hello.” He delivers this message with a slight chuckle that has a certain, almost subversive quality to it. Watch Pence give enough speeches, and you’ll notice that this often happens when he’s in front of a friendly crowd. He’ll be witnessing to evangelicals at a mega-church, or addressing conservative supporters at a rally, and when the moment comes for him to pass along the president’s well-wishes, the words are invariably accompanied by an amused little chuckle that prompts knowing laughter from the attendees. It’s almost as if, in that brief, barely perceptible moment, Pence is sending a message to those with ears to hear—that he recognizes the absurdity of his situation; that he knows just what sort of man he’s working for; that while things may look bad now, there is a grand purpose at work here, a plan that will manifest itself in due time. Let not your hearts be troubled, he seems to be saying. I’ve got this."

"Much of this advice comes in the form of moralizing. But by making so much of our focus on what we’re doing “wrong,” we’ve removed much of the joy from eating and cooking. I made sure to avoid negative tones a couple of years ago when I drew up a manifesto/road guide we called simple rules for healthy eating. They include the idea that you aren’t going to avoid all processed foods, but you might try to limit them. The one I felt most passionately about was No. 7 — “Eat with other people, especially people you care about, as often as possible.” But lately, I’ve been thinking that No. 2 — “Eat as much home-cooked food as possible” — may be the most important.

I’ve recently been learning more about cooking theory — not so much following recipes, but understanding why those recipes work. A favorite guide in this quest is “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” by Samin Nosrat. Right there in the title are two “forbidden” elements. They’re also some of the main reasons good food tastes good.

The home-cooked food rule probably did more than any other to help Aimee and me get down to reasonable weights. Today, we’re much happier with how we look and feel. There are pictures of us looking happy in recent years around the house. Thanksgiving has reclaimed its mantle as my favorite holiday, because it’s so centered on food and family."

"2) After struggling to come up with a new book idea for so long, I could start to see all the connections between posts, the patterns, the idea planets I keep orbiting. Because it’s all in one place, hyperlinked together, I can see my own obsessions in a way that is much harder elsewhere. (Also: I’m owning my turf. This place has been around for a dozen years. Longer than Twitter and Tumblr and Instagram, and if I had to bet, I’d guess it will outlast them.)"

"Anyway, as far as I can tell, where young evangelicals are headed is simply out of evangelicalism. They have been, as Jared C. Wilson recently wrote, theologically and spiritually orphaned by pastors and other Christian leaders who were willing to entertain them and occasionally to hector them but who had no interest whatsoever in Christian discipleship. Millions of today’s young evangelicals have been utterly betrayed by a generation of pastors who could pontificate about how essential sexual purity is while simultaneously insisting that every real Christian should vote for Donald Trump, supporting their claims by a random handful of Bible verses wrenched from their context and utterly severed from the great arc of biblical story without which no piece of scriptural teaching can make sense. As I noted here, they cannot even distinguish a penitent from an impenitent sinner — that is how thoroughly they have emptied themselves of moral and spiritual understanding."

"According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, smoking is the leading preventable cause of death in America and kills 480,000 people in the US each year. In comparison, drug overdoses — which public health officials now consider a full-blown epidemic due to the opioid crisis — killed more than 64,000 in 2016."

"If you're an iPad power user, you know how big an update iOS 11 was, with drag and drop leading the charge. I've used and reviewed lots of apps that benefit immensely from drag and drop support, but I don't know that there's an app category better suited for this feature than mind mapping. Mind maps are built for natural touch interaction, so it’s no surprise that by adopting iOS 11’s systemwide drag and drop features, MindNode became the app I always wanted."

"I wouldn’t have said this 20 years ago, but now I know a lot of people who are gay and lesbian and they seem to have as good a spiritual life as I do. I think that kind of debate about lesbians and gays might be over. People who disapprove of it, they’ll probably just go to another church. So we’re in a transition and I think it’s a transition for the best, for the good. I don’t think it’s something that you can parade, but it’s not a right or wrong thing as far as I’m concerned.

RNS: A follow-up: If you were pastoring today and a gay couple in your church who were Christians of good faith asked you to perform their same-sex wedding ceremony, is that something you would do?

"Still, the one show is serving them awfully well. An executive at another podcasting company told me that assuming standard industry rates, Crooked Media is most likely bringing in at least $50,000 in advertising revenue for each episode of “Pod Save America” — which at two episodes a week is about $5 million a year. That has allowed the company to turn away the many investors who have approached it. Peter Chernin, whose Chernin Group acquired a reported 51 percent stake in the media company Barstool Sports last year, was one of them. “I think it’s more unusual than standard to turn down investors,” Chernin told me, “but it’s been very smart on their part.”"

"In a reversal of Adam Smith, Akerlof and Shiller contend that the invisible hand of the market guarantees phishing. Consider Cinnabon, whose brilliant motto is “Life Needs Frosting,” and which attracts customers with a seductive smell (and which has not made caloric information on its products at all easy to find). Or consider health clubs, a $22 billion industry with over 50 million customers, many of whom choose expensive monthly contracts, even though they would save a lot of money if they paid by the visit. In effect, they are paying not to go to the gym.

With reference to such examples, Akerlof and Shiller suggest that people can be imagined to have two kinds of tastes: those that would really make their lives better, and those that determine how they actually choose. In their view, the latter—influenced by a kind of “monkey-on-the-shoulder” who makes bad choices—often prevails. The problem is that as if by an invisible hand, companies “out of their own self-interest will satisfy those monkey-on-the-shoulder tastes.”"

"Akerlof and Shiller believe that the harms of alcohol are greatly underappreciated. They think that those harms “could be comparable to the harms from cigarettes, affecting not just 3 or 4 percent of the population, as a chronic life-downer [i.e., cause of a shortened life], but, rather, affecting 15 to 30 percent; the higher number especially if we also include the alcoholics’ most affected family members.” Akerlof and Shiller assemble suggestive evidence that alcohol consumption does far more damage to health than we think. Their larger theme is that “alcohol studies remain largely underfunded,” and without the necessary research, “we are especially prone to be phished for phools, since we cannot know whether we have the right story.” In their view, significant federal tax increases on ethanol (the kind of alcohol in alcoholic drinks) could have major health benefits—but the industry has successfully worked to prevent any such increases."

"Akerlof and Shiller believe that once we understand human psychology, we will be a lot less enthusiastic about free markets and a lot more worried about the harmful effects of competition. In their view, companies exploit human weaknesses not necessarily because they are malicious or venal, but because the market makes them do it. Those who fail to exploit people will lose out to those who do. In making that argument, Akerlof and Shiller object that the existing work of behavioral economists and psychologists offers a mere list of human errors, when what is required is a broader account of how and why markets produce systemic harm."